


Completely Soulless

by HomesickAlien



Category: Ensemble Stars! (Video Game)
Genre: 1st year dumb boys, Ear Piercings, M/M, dont do this at home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-18
Updated: 2018-06-18
Packaged: 2019-05-24 22:09:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14963105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HomesickAlien/pseuds/HomesickAlien
Summary: trial and error





	Completely Soulless

**Author's Note:**

> Something I wrote inbetween tending to my actual responsibilities and drinking.

The taste never seems to settle properly on his tongue. It's nothing like what Church might have convinced him it might taste like. It's so dry, and acidic; it's like vomit rolling back down his throat, burning away all his diffidence. _Until I can't feel a thing,_ he'd said. _So it doesn't hurt even a little bit_ , he'd said.

He reaches over Shuu for a bottle half empty, pouring another glass of wine with the finesse expected of a perfect marionette, but he can't feel as confident as Shuu does about his state of being. Not when he still feels fear, feels pain, feels anxiety. Shuu had promised him to take all those things away for him and yet he still feels alive, still feels human. It seems like things will always be this way. No matter where he runs away to, he’ll always be this way.

“ _I want you to do it.”_

_He says. It’s the first thing Nito’s said all day, in fact. Probably the first and only thing he’ll say all week. Shuu doesn’t take those things for granted, lifting up his head with a quizzical look to his partner. He’d already lost track of what they’d been talking about prior, he’s already lost in his art. Nito raises up the paper in his hand._

_“This,” He says with a pause, struggling to find his words like he were talking directly to God, “Is your ideal, isn’t it?”_

_It starts to come back to him, the things he’d been rambling off about before he’d started working, about their unit, their newly born Valkyrie. He doesn’t often do it, plan out what he wants to sew together, it seems inspiration just comes to him like a sudden wave crashing into the land. Rather, maybe it was just the convenience of showing Nito the concept in his head before committing to it whole-heartedly. Nito hates surprises, he hates things that come without warning, he hates Shuu, and so it’s only convenient for Shuu to learn how to confess his feelings properly._

_He’d forgotten all about it as soon as he’d picked up the needle._

_“Ideal… As long as it’s with you, Valkyrie is already ideal.”_

_Nito doesn’t have a reason, but he smirks at that. Shuu’s comments are always like that, so droll and thoughtless. He hides his smile behind the paper in his hand._

_“This,” Nito says, again, with more valor than before. “I want to do this.”_

_He points it out on paper first, then pulls at his ear for clarity. He does things in such endearing ways, it’s hard for Shuu to focus when Nito communicates back to him. He’s painfully infatuated, every word that slips from Nito’s lips just sound like hymns from a choir of Angels. Nothing is dramatic enough to express how he feels, it wears him down so slowly he thinks it might not even last a year. Their partnership is as fragile as a house of cards._

_“I wasn’t planning to actually pierce them. It would be problematic, wouldn’t it? An idol with…”_

_He doesn’t finish the thought. There’s a lot of missteps they could take here, their existence is so fragile that even the gentlest breeze could knock them down. No matter how confident Shuu boasts himself, he’s worked hard his entire life to earn it; as prime and pristine as an idol ought to be no matter how much the pressure rattles his brain. He’s such a fool but plays his stage presence like the sovereign he devotes himself to be._

_No matter how perfect he sees Nito to be, his image of his doll and his acts never fall in line. They’re so foreign Nito’s already lost on what his identity is supposed to be. Sometimes, it seems, being stupid together is the only out for lacking a personality altogether._

_“I want to do it.”_

_Nito is always so adamant about the most asinine things, Shuu’s never sure what to do with such a strange doll like him. He’s as complacent as they come, but never follows orders when they matter, which leads them to this tenuous moment of their youth. No matter how Shuu asserts himself, he can’t deny the will of his most precious thing._

It doesn’t really taste like anything, anymore. He’s not certain it ever really did. He couldn’t say what glass it is, four, five, or six or seven; just that he hasn’t died, yet.

He can see straight, but when he sits up the vertigo catches up with him rather quickly. He wonders if this is what his life is becoming; if this is what it will be like to stumble off a stage every so many days as an idol. It’s almost invigorating, no matter how many times Shuu dehumanizes him this is the most alive he’s ever felt. His head falls as he looks to Shuu at his side with glazed eyes; Nito looks so disappointed but he always has that kind of face, and so Shuu’s only reaction is to smile at him with the endearment of a heartfelt lover. He thinks, no teenage boy could ever be so honest, could ever be so infatuated at the sight of another, and yet that’s the only thing that binds the two of them together.

Nito isn’t afraid of Shuu at all, anymore. Annoyed or tired, sometimes, but fear is the last emotion felt in his heart when this awkward boy crashes into his life. Keeps fumbling over him, begging for his attention, like if Nito ignored him his entire life would end somehow.

It’s such a burden, Nito’s not sure how to handle the weight of someone else’s world on his shoulder.

“I want to do this.”

He says, with a surprising accuracy to his annunciation. Reaffirming, without any room for misunderstanding, it’s the first and last time they’ll ever share such a moment together.

Shuu nods his head mindlessly, scooting over closer to Nito and pushing him by the shoulder to lay back down on his bed. He’d prepared haphazardly all kinds of things along with the wine they’d stolen out his parents cabinets. Nito had done all the research, no matter how often Shuu bothered him about how painfully inaccurate it all sounded, and no matter how often Shuu had offered to have some sort of professional do it in his place. Nito would stare at his phone then glare right up at Shuu, and without a word it had become clear who’d won this argument.

It was at Shuu’s suggestion they drink, like a communion just for the two of them. A special moment of rebirth, a connection between God and his disciples. Shuu is the only one who could be so ignorantly confident, so prideful of his work, and equally self conscious of every step they take. He’s the stupidest kind of genius, the one who has no common sense whatsoever. As awkward as they come, that even something as childish as getting drunk together needs some kind of divine explanation to justify their actions. Everything is fated, nothing is inconsequential; that is the motto of this, their Valkyrie. Nito’s Valkyrie. Shuu’s Valkyrie.

He pours out a different kind of alcohol onto a cotton ball, the kind that smells rancid and dizzying, that lingers like a buzz pounding at his skull. It smells worse the closer Shuu gets it to his face, or rather, his ear. _Let’s just start with one,_ he’d said. _Let’s just pierce one,_ Nito said, losing most of all his resolve with every minute that passed him by. It’s a common issue for Nito, he seems so content to passively float away on the river of life but this Itsuki Shuu won’t let him be satisfied with any of that.

He’s grateful, whether he says it or not. He’s still not sure he has one, yet; a reason to live. A meaningful life. A purpose in waking up just one more morning in the week, but he does so anyway, each and every day. He does so anyway, just to practice once more before the sun rises, and give Shuu a reason to be impressed with him like he needs a reason at all.

It doesn’t hurt.

That’s the most shocking revelation to him. That was the point of drinking, after all, but he hadn’t even processed Shuu’s words motivating him through every step once the stench of alcohol clouded his mind altogether. He hadn’t heard him saying, _I’m going to do it now. Are you alright? Will it be alright?_ He’s certain the only thing that convinced Shuu he were still alive was the nod of his head after so many awkward pitches rang through his ears.

He hadn’t felt it at all, just as expected. It’s almost disappointing to reflect on, but there’s always the unexpected pains that follow such amateur work. Shuu’s generally so keen of being as perfect as any human could be on this catastrophe Earth, it’s pleasant to Nito to see such a fret of worry wash over his face at the atrocity he’s committed. It’s like a parent catching a child in the cookie jar, immature and genuine.

“ _Shisan…”_

Nito runs his hand through Shuu’s hair, as painstakingly slowly as the amount of time it took to pierce skin with a rubbish needle. He can’t say he really feels it, but the awareness of a safety pin clipped to his ear is so consciously in his mind he has to cling to some other reality to keep himself from fumbling with it. At first, it’s Shuu’s soft, thin hair, but in time his fingers are wandering straight down to trace the outline of Shuu’s ear, stopping at the lobe and making note of how plain it seems now. His right ear is the same, now.

“That’s not my name.”

“I know.”

He smiles, this soft and gentle kind of smile that disguises and sense of teasing laced in his words. No matter what he does, he’s cursed like a princess in a tower to be this precious, cutesy existence without any worth outside of this. The only thing that makes Shuu special is his glasses are tinted with a different shade. The way he sees Nazuna, it’s all the same yet so different, it holds all the nuance of a tonal difference.

When Shuu calls Nito cute, it sounds like a foreign word rolling off his tongue.

“I felt it, for a minute there. What it’s like to be free, I felt it, really.”

He wonders how much of him is speaking honestly, and how much of it stems solely from being drunk and numb to the world around him. Confidence only seems to bloom under such wretched circumstances, after all, delusional only at the expense of being intoxicated. But it might be the only sensation he never forgets, he’d like to make note of it before he passes out without any control left of his body.

He pulls Shuu into him by the back of the head, as if in the same fell swoop that pierced his flesh they could meld into one another. He covers Shuu’s eye with his palm, like he’s reaching right in to the window of his soul. It feels more so that he’s lost any control of his limbs at all, just moving— _dancing—_ to whatever rhythm feels right for the moment. There’s a special sensation, a once-in-a-lifetime kind of moment playing it’s reel before them but they’re so ignorant and mindless it passes like a dream to be forgotten in the morning. No matter how good the feeling is, or how long it lingers, the image can never be painted so accurately again.

“I think I could fall in love with you if I really tried.”

Nito commits to his confession whether he’ll lose it in the morning after or not, it’s the only thought burning in his heart the closer Shuu comes to him. Distance, itself, feels like an illusion, he’s long since dissociated from the reality around him. Maybe he’s already dreaming.

He’s already become Shuu’s ideal, after all. He was born to be it. Like an actor in a film taking on the course of a life outlined for him before he were born, being with Shuu feels the closest to talking to God he’s ever come. No amount of praying could ever take him this far, or give him the clarity to keep breathing and moving forward.

It doesn’t mean anything, he tells himself. It’s as insignificant as holding onto faith, he tells himself, when he kisses Shuu for the very first time.

It’s a sensation that’s incomprehensible. He doesn’t know if it lasts or if Shuu protests in a way he’s certain Shuu would. Before he’s aware of the touch of Shuu’s lip over his he’s nearly unconscious. The time had passed without any concern for their well beings, and even were it not so late he’s sure if he stood up he would have collapsed on the spot. Maybe, when the sun rises he’ll be wrought with infections and all the pain he’d missed out on in the evening. It doesn’t concern him much either way, because even if he still has trouble smiling properly, he finally has a visual representation of what it feels to be satisfied. To be genuinely happy, it’s the special kind of gift that only comes once in a person’s entire lifetime, sometimes not even once.

Even if he and Shuu share it; the soulless existence that berates humanity altogether, it seems only when suffering in unison does the light of Heaven and all it’s forgiveness shine down on heretics like them.

**Author's Note:**

> comment. thanks.


End file.
